Messy Questions
I’ve been holding off writing about some of the major themes I want to deal with simply because they are so fraught. And if I’m being entirely honest with myself, I suspect my takes are the sort liable to piss off people from every which way. We seem to have settled as a society on a small number of 3 or 4 acceptable scripts that you’re given to choose from when talking about the hard issues. Those scripts are designed to endear you to other people who pick the same scripts, and they mark you out as foes to the people who pick the opposite scripts.
I don’t really have that luxury, though. I don’t have the luxury to sit on the sidelines watching debates about things like transness from afar like an armchair quarterback scholar analyzing something they don’t have real experience with. And yet also I am a scholar of other things, which means I don’t have the luxury of thinking that because I had some idea about something once it must be true. Life is messy and fucked up and extraordinarily complicated to understand, and I have no choice but to live that fact every day. Transitioning is, if nothing else, a profoundly humbling experience, because it exposes the limits of what we know and lays bare just how very much that knowledge is surpassed by what we do not know. What we know could fill a thimble, and yet here we are, so very certain of our positions that we sit on the brink of a civil war.
But that’s not what scholars are supposed to say, is it? We’re supposed to be experts. Knowledgeable. Selling our wares on the marketplace, amassing cultural capital with all the things we know. Dominating people in debates and punditing away on tv and twitter and pretty much anywhere anyone will listen. Is it a mystery that, with so much to be gained by knowing, we have devolved into a society bickering over every last scrap of information and little factoid and opinion as if our very lives depended on whether gender is an X or a Y or a shirt or a swish or a result of how you were brought up or the ads you consumed in magazines? Who gives a fuck? I want to shout. We don’t actually need to know. But that’s not what scholars are supposed to say, is it? It would be unbecoming the profession.
Am I a man? Am I a woman? Am I something else? What if I told you I don’t know and I don’t care? I think the better question is what can be learned from this?
When I went to pull a tarot card for today’s woo (which I am doing right here now, thank you very much), I pulled the Blue Heron. In most of the world’s traditions, the heron represents patience and stillness (because he stands so long in wait as he fishes), solitude and independence (because he does not flock), introspection and plumbing the inner depths (because he spends time in water, quietly, alone), and is considered a messenger from the divine (as are most birds, who spend their time in the sky). Patience, introspection, self-mastery, and connection to the divine are thought to combine in a way to bring luck and wealth, and herons are considered by most to be an auspicious sign.
In Christianity, by contrast, herons are often considered negative omens for the same reasons. Asocial loners, their independence is seen as a sign of disconnection from the divine.
I confess I am inclined to go with the former rather than the latter. How exactly does one look at one of God’s creatures in its natural state, doing exactly what it was born to do, and conclude, man, what a terrible thing, just a real cautionary tale? What else do you have to believe for that to make sense? Were all creatures put on earth to just be negative lessons to us? Herons exist as flying pieces of unhappy garbage just so humans can be reminded to be social conformists? How does that square with Christian hermits who go into the desert to contemplate God? Are they negative omens because they’re a little out of the ordinary and asocial? I….yeah. No. Sorry. Makes no sense. We’re reading it wrong if that’s the conclusion we’ve come to.
Plato once had Socrates describe his hermeneutic method as approaching from below in such a way as to seem nonthreatening or even beautiful, because when placed in a situation in which one feels safely in the presence of something beautiful, one overflows oneself and thereby reveals their true nature. If I have understood it correctly, this is how revelation works. It is not the same as torturing information out of an object by poking and prodding and peppering it. Nor is it the same as asking to what degree the object in question looks like you and then assessing how well it does or doesn’t measure up. When you torture something, all it sings back to you are falsehoods and nonsense. And when you measure others against yourself, all you get are dark shadows of yourself rather than any information about the object in question. This is what it means to see through a glass darkly. Seeing only the worst of ourselves, rather than the best of the world. When you let something simply be and unobtrusively provide space for that, however, it shows itself to you in its unabashed glory.
Do I have answers? Not really. Mostly just questions. But I’ve learned one or two things about how to form those questions over the years, and I think maybe we could learn a few things if we approached the world by asking what it has to say to us, instead of by asking how much it looks like us.
